Studio: international art (40.1907)

The Lay Figure

THE LAY FIGURE: ON THE

RULES AND CANONS OF ART.

“ I am often inclined to wonder,” began
the Art Critic, “whether there are really any of the
fundamental rules of art which are left unbroken by
one or other of our modern schools. There is, at
the moment, a curious unrest in the art world; a
strange kind of rebellion against even sane tradition
which seems to me to be leading a very large num-
ber of artists into courses that are often more than
questionable.”

“Are there any fundamental rules of art?”
enquired the Man with the Red Tie. “ Is there
such a thing as sane tradition ? To me it seems
that this unrest of which you complain is distinctly
a healthy sign ; it implies that the men of to-day are
not content to follow in the footsteps of their pre-
decessors, but are anxious—and rightly anxious,
mind you—to choose their own modes of expression.
Unrest, I am inclined to think, means progress
and new developments.”

“Not necessarily,” returned the Critic; “ it means
very often an impatience of discipline and a lazy
unwillingness to learn the very things upon the
knowledge of which all real progress and all true
development must be based. I hold that there are
essential rules and traditions of art which you must
observe if you wish to make progress. If you dis-
regard them you merely drift aimlessly, and you are
more likely to end in shipwreck than to come safely
into harbour.”

“ How sinfully old-fashioned you are ! ” cried the
Youth from the Art School. “You must have
been listening to the Professor of Painting at the
Royal Academy. Is there never to be anything
new in art? We are going to wake you up once
and for all, and to teach you something you never
knew before.”

“ Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings—
you know the rest of the quotation,” laughed the
Man with the Red Tie. “You hear the younger
generation. We are old fogies, you see, and we
must bow to the superior knowledge of the new-
comers. They have been at school more recently
than you or I, my friend.”

“ The omniscience of youth is, of course, pro-
verbial,” replied the Critic, “ but though I have
acquired ignorance with lapse of years, I am still
young enough to have retained some convictions;
and among these is a belief in the value of the
great principles which always underlie all high
achievement in art.”

“ But we are going to make new rules,” inter-

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rupted the Youth from the Art School; “ we are
going to destroy all the fossilised traditions and to
put in their place something much more intelligent
and up to date. We are modern men, and our art
must be modern too.”

C “Oh ! you cannot get along then without rules,”
said the Man with the Red Tie. “ Why, you are
as bad as all the rest! I thought you were going
to claim [the right to be independent and to do
your own work in your own way. But you only
propose to substitute one cut-and-dried set of rules
for another. Shame upon you ! Do you call that
progress ?”

“ Of course it is progress,” returned the Youth
from the Art School, “ because we shall substitute
rules which give us liberty for those which bind us
down to do simply what others have done already.
Our greatest rule of all is that we shall study Nature
as we find her, and represent her just as she is,
without showing fear of critics or favour to pro-
fessors. We are going to make the traditions for
the future.”

“ Heaven help the future! ” sighed the Man
with the Red Tie. “ If we must have rules we
had better stick to those which have stood the
test of centuries; at any rate, we know where we
are with them. I doubt whether the new batch
will be any better than the old.”

“I have no doubt at all in the matter,” said the
Critic ; “ I am no upholder of obsolete conventions,
but I do say that there are many of the ancient
canons which cannot be departed from without
bringing disaster upon art. The parrot-cry of the
younger school to-day is that you must study Nature
and represent her faithfully; and the men who
shout loudest prove their sincerity by choosing as
their subject for study everything that is vilest,
ugliest, most debased, and most unnatural. If
they chance upon something that is beautiful in
nature they torture it into hideousness by their
manner of treating it. They outrage every law of
taste, every rule of art, and they set up a convention
of gross and indecent ugliness merely for the sake
of avoiding what they regard as the convention of
beauty. They refuse, indeed, to enquire what
beauty means; to escape the labour of training
themselves to select the best that Nature offers
them, they shelter behind an utterly unintelligent
formula. In truth, the new rules are infinitely worse
than the old; but unfortunately they are adopted
by the younger generation because by their assistance
a cheap sensationalism is attainable. But where is
it all going to end ?

The Lay Figure.